In the stock market, who are those guys that yell random stuff and throw paper everywhere?

Question

and cheer and stuff, and why do they do that?

Answer 1

Those guys are floor traders for brokerages that own seats on the exchange. They are simply yelling to communicate the availability of buyers and sellers for a particular stock (in the case of the NYSE). These traders are no longer allowed to freely trade with their "inventory" to create liquidity so the bid ask spreads are not just profit as some think. The quantity of yelling and the magnitude of bid ask spreads will continue to decline as we more toward fully electronic markets.

Answer 2

Those are stock brokers or reps for the brokerage houses and they're not yelling random stuff, they're yelling instructions to buy or sell stocks based on their customers' orders. The whole thing looks very chaotic because everyone is moving really fast in all different directions at once but they have to keep that pace up, otherwise they might not be getting the price they're expecting on the stocks. Even a 20-second delay can be enough for a stock price to go way up or way down. So they have to yell their orders to the people who accept the orders, and get the orders placed as fast as possible.

They yell and cheer when they make a particularly good deal, like if you buy 100,000 shares of a stock for your customers at $10.00 per share, then 2 minutes later it goes up to $10.50 per share, they just made a nice chunk of money for themselves and their customers. Which is worth cheering over!

Answer 3

That's what these guys are paid for....yelling random stuff, throwing paper everywhere, sometimes even fighting with each other........

Answer 4

They are trying to buy and sell stock. They have to yell to get the attention of the board man.